Warm Up With Some Winter Risotto
Why not swap out your traditional pasta dish and try something new and delicious? Learn about risotto, the creamy Italian rice dish that can take on a million and one flavors.
You can find some scrumptious recipes online to create it yourself. You can also dine in one of the many Traverse City restaurants that know how to whip up a good batch of Risotto. The thick creamy rice will warm you up in a heartbeat. Plus the wonderful spices and flavors that the chef masterfully works into the broth will keep your fingers and toes warm for the rest of the night and keep you talking about the risotto for the next few weeks.
The rich indulgent dish can be found with a number of flavors. Lighter dishes with chicken, scallops and shrimp can be located. There’s also richer dishes with beef, lamb and even pumpkin or acorn squash. If you’ve never had risotto, it’s about time you’ve tried a dish of it.
If you’ve already tried it, then you know just how good it can be. There’s a delicate balance between too much liquid and too thick, but when done right, it is absolutely wonderful. Watch any cooking competition show and they always seem to cook risotto – though not all of them do it as well as they should be.
You can grab a flat pan and a bag of risotto to make it yourself, too. With about a ½ stick of butter and two cups of risotto, you’ll toast up the little morsels. Then you can add a little flavoring to infuse into the risotto. This could be onions, scallions, garlic or any other tasty treat. Think about how you want to deglaze it, which will add another rich flavor into the risotto. Creativity comes in handy here – as well as alcohol.
A bottle of Guinness, red wine, white wine and even a bottle of champagne (perhaps one that you didn’t drink in its entirety on New Years). Pour some into the pan until it evaporates. Add in warm stock – chicken, beef, vegetable or even a fish broth. Slowly add it in a cup at a time.
The whole process takes about 45 minutes to make risotto properly, but you’ll be standing in front of the hot stove the whole time, so the winter weather will never bring you down. Finish off with a tablespoon of mascarpone and voila!
